The Runaway Bridge Budget

State transportation officials stood by as planning costs for the Interstate 5 Columbia River Crossing ballooned.

Yet David Evans couldn’t finish the work even with a contract that paid more than twice what was originally planned.

On May 2008, Evans
delivered the hefty Draft Environmental Impact Statement along with some
bad news: The firm had used up the $50 million in less than three
years.

And the project was
far from finished: David Evans still had to produce the Final
Environmental Impact Statement, published September 2010.

The cost of the contract exploded with a startling lack of oversight and public review.

On May 16, 2008, Doug
Ficco, a WashDOT engineer then in charge of the project, submitted a
terse four-page memo seeking an additional $45 million for the Evans
contract.

Normally, public
agencies are required to seek competitive bids when contract amounts
exceed a certain threshold. But to get that money for David Evans, Ficco
didn’t need to get new bids from other contractors or even seek
legislative approval. He merely had to answer a few brief questions on a
WashDOT form.

Here’s the key question: “Explain why the services were not included in the terms of the original contract?”

“The services were included,” Ficco wrote. “The funding wasn’t.”

That was his entire answer.

And David Evans got $45 million added to its contract.

Patricia McCaig is
both a consultant to David Evans and the adviser to Gov. John Kitzhaber
on the CRC project. She isn’t paid by Kitzhaber, but she’s billed David
Evans $227,000 so far. McCaig says although the $45 million increase did
not require approval of lawmakers or the states’ governors, it wasn’t
just rubber-stamped.

She says project officials wrote the contract to be amended without rebidding if Evans performed well.

“The caliber and
quality of work is evaluated all the way up to the [transportation
department] directors,” McCaig says. “I don’t think anybody ever thought
you could get to an ROD [Record of Decision] for $50 million. I believe
that was just the maximum contract amount WashDOT could sign at the
time.”

Portland economist
Joe Cortright, a critic of the CRC, says the practice of low-balling the
cost of the initial contract and then hiking the price through
amendments, or “change orders,” allows agencies to skirt oversight.

“Why wouldn’t you
rebid the contract when you are almost doubling the initial amount?”
Cortright asks. “The argument is always that you’ve built relationships
that would be lost with a rebid, but that’s not a good excuse.”

Oregon and Washington
officials did it again in April 2010, extending the deadline by 18
months. A year after that, they increased David Evans’ contract to $105
million and pushed its life out to December 2012.

Of the total
contract, David Evans itself has collected $33 million and has paid the
remainder to subcontractors to help with planning. (For a list of how
much subcontractors got paid, download it here.)

McCaig and Wylder say mega-projects such as the CRC present many variables.

“The
range of alternatives and unanticipated specific challenges, you don’t
know them all,” McCaig says. “Being 18 months off on a project like this
is actually on time.”

McCaig
says it’s unfair to assume that, simply because the CRC blew its
planning deadlines as costs grew, the actual building of the bridge will
also go over budget and past its deadlines. “It would be like comparing
apples and oranges,” she says.

Cortright says the
project’s record makes him skeptical—as does the poor track record of
similar mega-projects across the country.

“There aren’t effective mechanisms to hold them accountable when budgets and deadlines are not met,” he adds.

And the CRC saw its
costs explode while doing the easy part: planning. Just wait, he says,
until the project actually starts building a massive new bridge,
disrupting a freeway that carries 120,000 vehicles per day, and working
in the Columbia River under strict rules to protect sensitive salmon
habitat.

“Experience should
tell us the risk is on the upside in these projects,” Cortright says.
“It’s going to take longer and cost more than they say.”